1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the Internet and the World Wide Web and, more particularly, the invention relates to methods and systems for identifying items represented on web pages and for providing supplemental information about items represented on web pages.
2. Description of the Related Art
Web pages provide a highly flexible and effective medium for presenting information to people. The information on any particular web page is generally not, however, optimized for substantive analysis by machine or computer.
One type of substantive analysis of a web page that can be automated is a determination as to what item or items are represented on a web page. An item can be any identifiable thing, such as a product, a service, a job listing, a company, or a person. Prior technology has generally relied upon regular expression matching, which can be unreliable and which may require substantial processing. The present invention seeks to address this problem among others.